Many people underestimate the phenomenon of popularity of the TikTok service, which has existed for only a few years, but has already shown that even such long-term leaders as Instagram and Facebook pale in comparison with it. Indeed, this service, which has Chinese roots, simply breaks the service market and shows not even explosive, but an avalanche-like growth. Millions of users around the world not only registered in it, but even upload their videos there. Despite the recent “beautiful people” scandal, TikTok continues to gain traction. What will happen next and can people ignore this phenomenon?
TikTok is evolving faster than we thought.
Many users of the service simply do not realize how popular TikTok is now when they join it because they “heard about it somewhere”. As a result, at first they just watch other people's videos, and after that they try to upload their own. For no apparent reason, he gains hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of viewing, and the person is lost even more.
It turns out that in less than four years, TikTok has become, if not the most, then one of the most significant cultural products in the world. It allows people to do things that YouTube and other similar services do not allow them. Nobody wants to watch the same video for a long time. The tendency towards fragmentation is easy to see in the example Twitter, where people do not want to read the news for a long time, as they used to in the newspaper. They only need the title and they can scroll further. So it is here, but the semantic load of the videos is significantly lower than in the tape Twitter. They are more entertaining than educational, although there are different things.
According to various information, the daily audience of active TikTok users reaches one billion people. This is a lot, and such an army can make it not only the most successful startup, but also one of the most expensive companies in the world.
TikTok reportedly spent up to $ 3 million a day on promotions in 2018 and 2019. This was done in various ways, but led to the fact that about 30-40 percent of users who tried the service stayed with it, replenishing its audience.
So the company was able to achieve performance that became even better than those of Facebook and Instagram, especially against the background of a drop in the number of downloads of the latter.
The speed of TikTok development compared to other services. The audience is not yet the largest, but TikTok has typed it much faster than everyone else.
All of this is happening amid a couple of recent scandals. In one of them, service managers were implicated, who allegedly told their moderators to make sure that videos with ugly people were watched as little as possible. The same applied to people with disabilities, disabilities and simply the poor. That is, the videos were supposed to show only successful and beautiful people, and not life as it is.
This scandal was somehow let down on the brakes, and TikTok representatives made excuses and said that there was no such thing. In all fairness, there really was no serious confirmation of this fact.
The second scandal was related to the fact that in the US everything Chinese immediately attracts attention as soon as it becomes a little more popular than at the time of launch. As a result, there was another talk about interference, espionage and the like. However, it should be noted that although the owner of the service is a Chinese company, the servers are not located in this country. Perhaps this is how the company shows that everything is as safe as possible.
TikTok is owned by a Chinese company. Does this surprise anyone?
TikTok is now fully integrating e-commerce into video and is developing its own ad manager.
In addition, TikTok's ByteDance owns several other projects. Among them are several gaming companies and even the music app Resso, which the company is developing in India, combining TikTok with a music streaming service. Integration of games into it will make the whole venture even more profitable and attractive to users. All this happens against the background of how other companies are developing only one service, not trying to do deep integration with others. This model is more typical of the Chinese, who love universal tools, like WeChat, which has a messenger, a payment service, and much more.
When everything planned is implemented, it is TikTok that will become the social network of the future, because the functions that it now has will not go anywhere, and new ones may appear. As a result, we will get a real harvester, which will be attractive for everyone with something of its own. It's like playing Fortnite and watching movies or listening to music there.
Let's discuss in Telegram chat how you feel about TikTok.
The market has already begun to show that it is ready for this. Even the way YouTube brings together audio and video content “under one roof” shows that such an idea has prospects. Either it just coincided and China understood before anyone else that it was possible, or we, simply without noticing it, are too influenced by what comes to us from the Celestial Empire.
It is difficult to predict the exact audience of TikTok in a year or two, but one thing is clear – already now it has become something that cannot be ignored. He shot like no one before him, and is not going to give up positions.